As I sit here sipping a cappuccino before heading out for the evening, I’m pondering what may be one of my bigger decisions of the last decade; obviously not THE biggest, if you know me, but still – moderately challenging in terms of determining the best course of action.  As is typical with me and my fellow-travelers, Byronesque romantics all, my head and heart are leading me in two different directions for the moment.  Will there be a dramatic last-minute reconciliation between the two?  Will there be a slow arabesque, drawing head and heart closer together until finally they realize that they can coexist and be happy together with the same decision?  Will they remain standoffish, forcing me to choose the happiness of the one at the expense of the other?  Only time will tell.

In the meantime, I Godzilla-wrestled my car into submission tonight, replacing a thornily-placed radiator hose with four connections, a mini-Hydra of rubber and grease and oxidized coolant.  I emerged victorious (naturally – I’m a stud).  However, I’m still picking grit and motor oil out of various crevices in my body, and this is even after I showered and scrubbed like a surgeon with OCD.  I figure after a couple cold beers I won’t mind, and I’ve learned quite a bit about my car’s engine in the last couple days that will serve me will for future explorations under the hood.

I’m going to stop there or else I’ll bore you to fucking tears and nobody likes a bore.

OK, first thing: these are RULES, not OPINIONS, so listen up, K?  K.  Also, I’m going to pick on a few tweeps in this post, but don’t consider it “picking on them”, consider it “pointing out their innate personality flaws.”

First of all: Upload an avatar.  If you have the default avatar, like phuongnguyen808, you just look like a hairless n00b.

Second: Your avatar should be a decent-sized picture, so that when I click on it, I can actually see someone.  Case in point: Tweep DJPLB, who just followed me, and who looks like a decent guy in the POSTAGE STAMP SIZED AVATAR PHOTO he uploaded.

Third: No sideways pictures.  JackieBolzan, I’m looking at you.  And hurting my neck.

Fourth: show your face.  Don’t look away from the camera.  Whatchoo lookin at, coolkarthik88?

Fifth: Make sure the height-to-width ratio is right, otherwise when I click on your avatar I get that carnival fun-house vertigo.  Dimpless95, resize that shit!

Sixth: Don’t include multiple people in your Twitter avatar photo, or else I can’t tell which one is you.  itspaigeollie, are you the cute one, the smart one, or the fat one?

Seventh: Avoid excess cleavage.  I know, I know, I’m losing man points for saying this, but I honestly don’t even remember this girl’s face.

Eighth: No cut-off photos. Oneway10, you’re not artsy, you just have bad aim.

Ninth: Don’t use a photo you took of yourself in the mirror with your phone.  Could you be any more ghetto?  That’s for sexting, not Twitter avatars.  Hey WhiteMamba04, I’m talking to you! 

Tenth: NO JUSTIN BIEBER AVATARS.  It’s just creepy.  Unless you’re actually Justin Bieber, in which case it’s still creepy, only slightly less so.

Gray area: You should use a photo, not an illustration.  There have been waves of Simpsons avatars, or South Park avatars, or others…at least using those I can tell your gender, your hair color, and probably your ethnicity.  This one from ximediaz really crosses the line, though.

Sometime last weekend, in what seems like another life, I stopped by Magnolia Village with the kids to spend a short time wandering through a closed-off McGraw Street, looking at hundreds of tons of cherry steel.  And by that I mean it was the annual Magnolia Village Car Show, filled with vintage autos and a smattering of newer high-priced greasemonkey masturbatory fodder.

My favorite?  The white 1959 Corvette shown in the third picture, which made me tingle in ways that are unfit for a family blog.  I could definitely see myself driving around in that, wrist on wheel, making the guys jealous and the ladies swoon.  A Prius, although much more sensible and eco-friendly, just doesn’t have the same effect as these classics.

Let’s say (hypothetically, of course, since this thing never happens in practice) that you wrote some code in a non-TDD way.  Let’s say it was a straightforward line extension of some working code, but with a new mode that caused the line to go from this:

A –> B –> C –> D

to include this:

A –> B’ –> C’ –> D’

so, in your hypothetical pre-coffee poor-decision-making state, you just pounded out B’, C’, and D’ without first writing tests.

Now, having written a few hundred lines of code, you feel that nagging twinge that tells you that you really would love to see test harnesses around this new code.  Do you:

a) use a coverage tool to tell you what is untested, and dutifully go back and write unit tests until you get to your desired coverage threshold?  (Mine is 85%, by the way).

b) Actually run the new code, and find out what breaks and start writing tests at the breaking points, because that’s empirical evidence of either faulty assumptions or poor execution

What would you do?  I (again, hypothetically), will would start with b), because empirical evidence is always superior, and I might get pulled AFK by the sound of an ice cream truck or something, and I’d hate to have written tests for the easy stuff but left the hard stuff out because I didn’t have time.

Yesterday I trekked downtown to the August TechCafe (formerly Seattle Lunch 2.0) event, hosted this time by Fenwick & West on their beautiful 10th-story rooftop deck.  Along the way I ran into plenty of old friends and, as I tend to do at these types of networking events, made some new ones as well.

The theme of the afternoon was “demo”, and three startups were given about 10 minutes each to present their goodies to a crowd of about 60:  Zebigo, a real-time ride-matching service; CrowdMap, a real-time collaborative mind-mapping tool, and IncFlow, a tool for managing trade credit applications.  Although Zebigo stood out for its simplicity and polish, I was really interested in CrowdMap, for a couple reasons: first, I’m a big fan of mind-mapping, both conceptually and in practice; and second, some of my friends and acquaintances in the local Seattle tech scene are part of the team, including Jennifer Cabala, Brian Gershon and Jeremy Lightsmith.  Also on the team is Sasha Pesulka, a fellow Seattle 2.0 contributor, but this was the first time I’d met her in person.

Kudos to the Fenwick & West team for hosting and making all of us feel welcome; and kudos to Josh Maher of TechCafe for continuing to put on one of the top tech networking events in Seattle.

I was diagnosing a problem with some SVN scripts today and came across an error: the batch file that called svn up was failing silently, and so the build that depended on the local files was not working properly either.

I figured it might be a problem running SVN in a batch file – perhaps interactive mode was on?  No, that wasn’t it.  I tried svn up from the /trunk/ and it worked as expected. Hmmm.

Turns out I should have tried svn up from the branch that was failing silently: when I did, I got this error:

svn: This client is too old to work with working copy
'/path/to/your/working/copy'; please get a newer Subversion client

This is all explained in the SVN FAQ.  You just have to update your SVN client and you’ll be OK.

However, my script should not have failed silently.  Always check your exit codes!  Actually, I’m not sure if checking the exit code would have worked in this case, but I’m assuming the Subversion developers are returning a nonzero result if there are problems like the one above.

“Proof of Life” was a movie from about ten years ago that starred Meg Ryan as the wife of a kidnap victim and Russell Crowe as the scarred military vet who was brought in to help rescue her husband.  The title refers to the kidnappers’ practice of sending photographs of the kidnap victims, holding a recent newspaper to “prove” that they were still alive.

Every now and then my soul sends me a photograph from the jungle.  It tells me it’s still alive, somewhere, and that I should keep searching, not give up hope, not surrender.

Some days it’s hard.  Some days it hurts; some days you want it to hurt, because to not have it hurt would seem to do an injustice to the importance of whatever is going on around you, within you.  And yet other days…other days the trees part, the sun shines, and stuff that used to seem so hurtful just doesn’t press down like it used to.

When the door closes, look for the window.  It may just be open.

Friday and Saturday I ran with Team Velociraptors in the 2010 Ragnar Relay NWP.  “NWP” stands for “Northwest Passage”, and it’s one of a handful of Ragnar events around the country in which teams of twelve runners run continuously for around 30 hours or so, in legs of 3 to 9 miles.

This event started at Blaine, right next to the Peace Arch at the Canadian border, and ended in Langley, on the southern tip of Whidbey Island.  In between we ran through Bellingham, the lovely Skagit Valley, Anacortes, La Conner, across Deception Pass, and up and down the hills of Whidbey Island.

I got hooked up with the team thanks to fellow runner and friend Chris Pothering, who I met on Daily Mile 6-odd months ago.  I signed up for the relay probably 5 months ago.  So of course I did most of my logistical race prep on Thursday.  Hey, there’s nothing like the last minute to get your adrenaline flowing!

Half of our team rode up Thursday night with Paul and Jenny Ingram in their Odyssey and overnighted in Bellingham.  The other half of the team came up early Friday morning.  I was in Van #2, the one that rode up Thursday night, along with Paul, Jenny, Chris, Joel, Leslie, Terry.  I’d previously only met Chris, Joel, and Leslie, but instantly became good friends with Paul and Jenny.  Paul was our driver, navigator, support staff, cheerleader-in-chief, and humorist all rolled into one.  He made the race so much better and saved the runners from having to double duty as drivers in between their legs.

On the way up to Bellingham we stopped for dinner at Claim Jumper and I had a 12-lb chicken fried steak.  More on that later. (ed: foreshadowing? Isn’t that kind of unnecessary in a blog post? Me: no way!)

Friday morning we made our way to the starting line and I was immediately taken with all the wild, creative decorating that some of the teams did to their vans.  Jenny went to work decorating our van and drew a scary dinosaur on our van with some window paint, along with our team name and other fun stuff.  Secondarily, I was blown away by some of the costumes.  One of the teams was “The Petting Zoo”, and they ran in animal costumes.  One guy, the cow, had udders coming out of his stomach area.  There were cavemen, cheerleaders, princesses, wild-haired rockers, whores, and several other themes I can’t remember.  I should have taken more photos.

Brad, from Van #1, started us off in Blaine and then we in Van #2 did the smart thing and went right to a Starbucks for some coffee.  Oh wait, we went to Target first and got a van-top carryall since we packed way too much stuff.  But then to Starbucks.  As we were drinking our coffee we got into a game where we tried to throw a scrunched-up pastry bag into the trash can and I’m proud to say I had the shot of the century – an up-in-the-air, off-the-chair toilet-bowl-flush shot.  Jenny captured it on video.

Then to Exchange 6, where we cheered on Katie and sent off Joel on Leg 7.  We picked up Chris, who had ridden in Van #1 to run Leg #4 since we only had 11 runners.  One of our team had to back out at the last minute so three of our runners – Chris, Leslie, and Katie – each picked up a fourth leg.  Superhuman.

My first leg, #10, was a shortish but hot leg at about 4:00 PM and I of course started out too fast, but realized it early enough to not kill the rest of my relay.  I had predicted 11-minute miles on average across all three legs, but I think I came in under that overall and felt pretty fit.  My main complaint on all three legs was tightness/creakiness in my knees and hamstrings.  And getting out there and running, just running, was freeing and fun and wonderful.  I was nervous going into each leg – what if I’m too slow?  What if I get lost?  What if I trip and injure myself?  – but once I started, all worries went away and I was just, you know, out there, one with nature and the team and the race.

At about 10:00 PM Friday night we got 45 minutes of sleep at Exchange 18, then were off again.  I ran Leg 22 at about 2:30 AM, in beautifully cool weather, under a nearly-full moon, just outside Anacortes.  That was my favorite leg.

We got about 3 more hours of sleep at Exchange 30 in Coupeville, in a gym at the Coupeville Middle School.  For some odd reason the fire alarm went off a couple times, but I slept like a rock, even on the hard gym floor.

By the time I got started on Leg 34, near Langley, I was feeling damned good (mentally) and not nearly as bad as I had feared (physically).  My legs were tired, but I knew I could finish.  Even a brutal hill in the middle of the leg didn’t diminish my confidence, and I notched up a few “kills” (where you pass another runner) on that hill.  Speaking of kills, I was negative for the race, due to some speedy jackrabbits in later-starting teams, but I passed enough people that I was only mildly negative.

Funniest moment?  For me, there were a few.  One was when we watched this video of the “full on double rainbow” guy.  Another was before Leg 33.  We had dropped off Terry and went to a little store for coffee.  I had filled up four large coffee cups with drip and cream before Paul realized there was espresso further back in the store.  I went ahead and bought the coffee anyway, since I’d sort of committed myself.  Then at the Leg 33 parking area, the van in front of us looked at my coffee cup and said “Oh my god, that looks so good” and I took the opportunity to give away the extra hot coffee.  Good karma and all that.  Then I went to the port-a-potty and spent a few choice minutes getting reacquainted with my chicken fried steak, so to say.  Feeling a few pounds lighter, I made my way to the handoff area and this exchange took place:

Jenny: So, you got rid of it.

Me: Yeah!

Jenny: The coffee.

Me: (confused) No, the chicken fried steak.

Jenny: (confused)

Me: (confused)

Then I doubled up with laughter.  She was referring to me giving away the extra coffee, but I was referring to, well, something else. Too funny.

A few other things that were memorable: holding flowers out for the runners as they came up for water.  Learning how to best support runners by leapfrogging in the van and being ready with water or Gatorade.  Tapping the one-mile-out markers as I ran by them, for good luck.  Not stopping to walk, even on hills.  Getting caught with my pants down as I was changing out of my sweaty running clothes at the start of Leg 24, when the van parked behind us turned on the lights.  Oops!

Most of all, I just loved the team, the camaraderie, the together-ness of it all, and the pure joyous act of running.  Many or most of us are at least interested in doing it again next year, and I know for sure I’m going to be in Blaine next July.

This video from Empire of the Sun wins the award for “Best Hats”.

And by “Best Hats”, of course I mean “Worst Hats”.

Also: I will not give you the last 5:11 of your life back.  SUCKA!

My recent faves – some are old, some are new, some are red, some are blue:

Your English Is Good – Tokyo Police Club

Fidelity – Regina Spektor

Moves – The New Pornographers

Bulletproof – Le Roux

End Love – OK Go

Flathead – The Fratellis

All massively spectacular.